Mr. Alistair Phillips works at a major trauma clinic in Southampton, where he receives many referral cases of patients who require elbow surgery and complex trauma reconstruction, often from car accidents.

A talented team of engineers at Michigan Technological University has developed a method for creating a patient-specific 3D-printed cast to treat bone fractures of the forearm and wrist. The project leverages Materialise's Lightweight Structures Module which was used to create the high porosity lattice structure of the casts. These were then 3D printed at Materialise’s production facilities for human testing.

The study of thumb movement has long been hampered by the limitations of conventional motion-capture techniques. To really get underneath the skin of the test subjects, researchers at KU Leuven Kulak turned to medical 3D imaging to view the full range of the hand’s kinematic chain, including the trapeziometacarpal, scaphotrapezial and radioscaphoid joints.